


Bell Curve

by Anonymississippi



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: But there's also a little gore?, F/M, Kirsch/LaF BrOTP is my new thing, Zeta Society - Freeform, and science, fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 03:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3193913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirsch is working on an ecology project and Danny just wants to kill something. There's tension, archery, and intestines. Not necessarily in that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bell Curve

“So you’re telling me that it’s gonna look like a bell?”

“Yes.”

“Tinkerbelle?”

“No.”

“Door bell?”

“No, Kirsch, not ding-dong. Like a _bell_ , bell.”

Danny was hunched over her tray at the cafeteria table she and a handful of Summer Soc ladies had commandeered for the noonday meal between classes. She found herself within earshot of a frankly bizarre conversation between her antagonistic dude-bro and the more-than-acquaintance yet not-quite-friend-level science aficionado. Danny watched LaF draw a soft incline with their index finger in the air before Kirsch. The bro stood before the drink machine in the caf with arms crossed and brows squinched together, following the tip of LaF’s finger like it held all the enigmatic answers to the universe (or to his Intro to Lit final).

“And this is the peak, the highest average of your scoring specimens.”

LaF then dropped their finger in a gradual sloping decline, leveling out the tip into a straight baseline with an end point at the orange soda button of the machine.

“Score! Initiating citrus carbonation intake!” LaF said, and reached for the can. They popped the top and gulped once, releasing a refreshed _aaahh_ while Kirsch soldiered on with the (again) utterly strange convo.

“The sample population has been averaging really low scores,” Kirsch said. “And yeah, I guess the scoring matters, but like, you want them healthy the most. High scores usually mean they’re at their physical peak. Not a lot of disease, better BMIs, stuff like that.”

“You’re wanting to shift the bell curve all by yourself?” LaF asked, eyeing Kirsch with the calculating condescension of scientific objectivity. They ticked their fingers against the side of the can in agitated thought. “The grounds are pretty big, but you’d probably have to petition the Styrian alderman to up the harvest requirements.”

“More like their Wildlife board, local councils aren’t in charge of stuff like that. I can always go visit one of my senior bros in the animal husbandry building. He’s got access to like, all of these records that go back and back to the Stone Age. You know, before computers were a big thing, Science-bud.”

“So, only fifteen… twenty years max?”

Kirsch nodded enthusiastically.

“I mean, I guess that’s a good enough time period for your sample. It’d be better if you had records for say, fifty years, and graphs and maps and reports on environmental changes, external species introduced to the habitat and corresponding dates, that way you could find a direct correlation in health and population drops when new predators—”

“Woah, wait a minute, I definitely didn’t sign up for all the paper work,” Kirsch responded.

“I could do it," LaF smiled. "I’ve got a program where I input the data and it can generate the report. It’s just a matter of you finding the records, maybe having some first hand accounts of what you’re looking to do. Pictures, antler samples, etc.”

“But you think it’s a good enough idea for my Ecology final?” Kirsch asked. “I mean, we should probably do it any way. Bigger, healthier populations of native animals have a better chance when all these Silas whack-jobs bring in their Wereanimals and changelings and, like, dinosaur crossbreeds.”

“Silas certainly doesn’t shy away from the weird-factor, but I’d hope the administration would put the breaks on anything resembling genetically-engineered Cretaceous hunters,” LaF’s features relaxed into pensiveness as they stared off into the middle distance. “Imagine the lawsuits.”

“Yo, earth-to-Danny!” Monique said, waving a hand in front of her face.

Danny turned her attention back to the table, staring at her less-than appetizing Mystery Meat. She pushed her plate away and reached for her water bottle. If she couldn’t be full she could at least be hydrated.

“You spaced out there for a second,” Monique continued, snapping on a carrot.

“Sorry, I’m unimpressed by the selection here,” Danny said, pushing back from the table. She grabbed her tote and slung the strap over her shoulder, ran a hand through her hair, and saluted her comrades at the table. “Gotta go teach. Catch you gals tonight back at the lodge.”

She bypassed the drink machine during her exit. Both LaF and Kirsch had dematerialized, and with them, all talk of chiming bell shapes and Silas fauna.

 

* * *

 

 

The air was crisper than Granny Smith apples. Styrian autumns always possessed an inherent chill no matter the actual temperature, no matter the wind activity, and no matter the relative safety of the surrounding areas. The uncanny was simply intrinsic to the geographical boundaries. Standing on gritty Silas earth, casting practiced glances around open glades and wooded terrain, Danny felt exhilarated. The air consistently sent goose bumps pebbling over her skin in the coolest, loneliest forests or the warmest, snuggliest dorm rooms.

Danny leapt over semi-sodden leaves stamped into game trails, sinking and bouncing over soil that possessed an unnatural springiness. She’d been stalking the stag for the better part of an hour, but was no closer to loosing an arrow than she’d been when she strapped her quiver to her shoulder back at the Summer Soc lodge. Her nose felt raw and dribbled with snot; two-columned exhalations flew from her nostrils in milky streams of chilled vapor. The edge of her skullcap kept kicking up over the shell of her ear, such that the cartilage would go numb from a lashing wind and she’d have to rearrange her low ponytail in order to tug the hat back into place. She slid through the undergrowth graceful as a fox, flexing her fingers all the while.

If she ever got the opportunity to take a shot, she damned well didn’t want her fingers stiff and fumbling from the numbness of the cold. The chanting and wailing of her gastrointestinal system served as a rather audible reminder that she skipped lunch that day and roasted venison (especially coming from the kind of buck the Silas grounds sported) would no doubt hit the spot.

Danny flitted down into a ravine and jogged about a hundred yards to the northwest. She followed the sound of bodily thrashing and jostling leaves, as if a giant were tossing the ingredients for a rustic salad with massive oak tree trunks used for tongs.

Danny froze when she crested the ridge.

Twenty-five yards from her position beneath a large white elm, the young fallow buck wrestled with a low-hanging branch, its antlers caught up in the tangle of sticks and convoluted twiggery. It dug its hooves in the ground, rutting shallow grooves into the earth while grunting low and guttural in its effort.

Danny’s movements were fluid, practiced. She didn’t grope blindly, but slid her hand through the air, smoother than butter. Her jacket sleeve could have been a branch, waving with the fickle autumn wind. She clasped the fletching and brought the arrow forward, nocking and drawing in a single motion.

The buck freed itself from its arboreal prison and began cutting up the earth with the pointed tips of its antlers, standing broadside to Danny in the eerie gloaming. The shot would be simple, perfect, an arrow to sink just behind the shoulder blade and pierce the lungs, slide through the heart; a clean and quick kill with decimated pulmonary tissue and severed aorta.

“Wait.”

Danny twitched in her fully drawn stance and caught a peek of close-cropped hair right in her sightline. Kirsch was standing about ten yards away, oversized camera awkwardly plastered to his face. Danny flinched in surprise; the movement was rigid and robotic enough to spook the animal. Its head shot up and the deer stepped forward, tilting nose first at Danny and forcing her to hold her pose fully drawn until her biceps screamed from the exertion.

_Click click click._

Loud as bombshells dropped from the underbellies of fighter planes, the infernal _clicking_ continued until the buck wised up and skittered away, back into the sapling grove and out of Danny’s range.

“Shit!” she swore, and her bowstring fell slack. She’d lost the light, lost the buck, and was seriously about to lose her cool if the Zeta zombie didn’t give her a damn good explanation for his meddling.

“The hell, Kirsch? You totally sabotaged my shot!” Danny said, stomping towards her nemesis.

“Yeah, sorry about that Psych-society.”

“Kirsch!”

“Danny, right, right,” Kirsch said, though he seemed more interested in reviewing the photos on the camera than delivering a decent apology.

Danny watched as his smile grew in the graying twilight. Her anger and confusion faded into bafflement as he tucked the camera strap under his shoulder and raced toward her.

“You won’t be able to get a shot off under the canopy, the light’s too bad.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Danny huffed.

“C’mon, we better hurry!”

He nudged her shoulder then bolted through a dense thicket of trees. And Danny, if only to catch and subsequently throttle him, followed.

She caught up with Kirsch about two hundred sprinted yards due east. He stood at the edge of a clearing, his right hand extended back into the woods in a ‘halt’ position. Kirsch didn’t turn to look at her, didn’t even acknowledge her, but his fingers curled inward and he beckoned her forward with a snail-paced hand motion. Danny crept toward his right side and held an arrow at the ready, just to be safe. The open glade was brighter than the murky woods, the last few rays of stubborn sunlight shining overtop a horizon shielded by brush and adolescent cedars.

Sure enough, a trio of fallow doe was grazing not thirty yards from Kirsch’s vantage. But before them, ten yards closer, was another hearty young stag turned broadside and munching upon the vegetation, unawares and ripe for the proverbial picking.

Danny nocked an arrow and drew, but didn’t stutter-step when she heard Kirsch whisper directly into her ear this time: “Take the doe.”

“What?” Danny whispered, sibilant and insubstantial on the cold breeze.

“Just take the doe.”

“Wrong angle for the shot,” Danny griped, squinting her eyes as she shifted twenty degrees to her right to try for the biggest doe.

Kirsch moved behind her and she stiffened, tensed, because his hand was at her hip and he was guiding her, gently, another centimeter to the right. His other hand flew to her hold at the bow grip and his fingers tightened around her wrist.

“Up a bit, you’ll undershoot,” he mumbled closely, but dropped his hand so as not to interfere with the shot.

“You’re overcompensating for the distance.”

“The sun’s in your eyes, I can see it,” he whispered, and this time the goosebumps that ran down her arms had everything to do with heat and proximity, not cool seclusion.

Danny readjusted.

“Okay, on three,” he said. “One—”

Danny loosed the arrow and it plunged into the doe’s fur. The remaining deer scattered, and the wounded one bounded once, twice, and then stumbled, staggered, fell into the brush on the far side of the clearing and disappeared.

“You could’ve waited til ‘three’,” Kirsch grumbled.

“And you could’ve let me get the first buck,” Danny said, lowering her bow. “What the hell was that about?”

“Class project.”

“You’re not letting me hunt because of a project?” Danny asked, taking off in the direction of the felled deer.

“You can hunt, just maybe hold off on taking the bucks for a season or three.”

“Three seasons? You want me to pass up easy shots for three seasons?”

“Don’t you like, graduate soon anyway?” Kirsch rebutted. “Gotta go off and save the world next, right?”

“Kirsch, you’re only two years behind me,” Danny challenged. “That is, assuming you pass everything.”

She bent to her knees where the doe had been grazing, her eyes darting toward the wet slick of discolored grass that signaled the start of a blood trail. She whipped out her flashlight and headed toward the bushes across the field.

“You won’t even be here for three seasons, so why should I hold off for one?”

“I’m trying to shift the bell curve,” Kirsch mumbled from behind.

“I’m sorry,” Danny stopped, and shone her light beam directly into his eyes. He put his hand up to his face and recoiled, swatting at the light beam like he would a swarm of midges. “ _What_ are you trying to do?” she asked.

“I’m trying to shift the bell curve for older bucks to the right, so they score higher. It has to do with my ecology final.”

“Scoring? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Back home, there’s this thing called the Boone and Crockett Club. They score the deer according to how big their antlers are.”

“How did I know this would come down to another trophy on your wall?” Danny said with an eye roll. She was hunched over, bare hand to the ground, shining the beam down the blood trail as the first dregs of moonlight hit the tip-tops of the forest behind her. She and Kirsch were caught in the woods during that tenuous in-between of night and day. Never a good situation on Silas grounds.

“It’s not about the scoring,” Kirsch argued, arms crossed and tone petulant.

“See, you’re telling me it’s yet another measuring contest that we’ve got to enter,” she huffed, stood, and continued her tracking. “To be classified as good-better-best in the wild outdoors, when all I want is a meat that doesn’t have the modifier ‘mystery’ preceding it. Ah, there you are, beautiful,” Danny said, tapping the dead deer with the tip of her bow.

“I’ve been behind you the whole—”

“The deer, Kirsch. I was talking about the deer.”

“Yeah. Right, psshh, sure thing Psych-society.”

“Kirsch.”

“Danny. Sorry.”

Danny dug into her pocket and extracted her knife, a wicked blade she’d invested in after freshman year (better known as the year of skinning and gutting a handful of wild Gulons that had wandered onto the campus proper). She shoved it where the sun certainly didn’t shine, and cut a semicircle into the doe's backside to start the draining.

“You’re gonna dress it here?” Kirsch asked anxiously. He pulled a tentative one-eighty, neck snapping back and forth toward the tree line like a disoriented meerkat.

“I’m not leaving entrails on the stoop of a lodge full of girls. I learned my lesson the last time,” Danny muttered, tugging the colon out of the deer's ass.

“It’s just… it’s already dark,” Kirsch said.

“What? Scared are you?”

“Yeah! I might not be the smartest bro in the house, but I’m not an idiot. A load of steaming milk sack and stomach is gonna start smelling worse than Ollie and Carlos after a gym sesh, and that’s gonna attract all kinds of scary, Hottie Society.”

“Kirsch, I have a knife and I will castrate you if—”

“Danny! God, sorry, sorry, Danny! Just—ugh, here.” Kirsch pulled a knife from his back pocket and knelt beside her. His hands flew to the deerskin and Danny felt the sickening _crunch_ as they used their combined weights to break the pelvic girdle. On the back of Kirsch’s knife was a small hook, sharp enough to shear the fur from the skin and _rip_ the muscular line over the torso; the sternum split with a snap and wilted open, revealing a hot cavity full of animal innards.

“Where’d you get that?” Danny asked, but Kirsch was much too focused on his slicing precision.

Two quick cuts later and Kirsch had severed much of the fasciae holding the organs in place. The pair of Silas hunters stuck their hands in up to their elbows and pulled, lungs and liver and intestines yanked from the interior of the carcass and disposed of with a moist _plop_.

“Fuck, I _hate_ that part,” Kirsch said. He twitched in a little dance of disgust, discarding his knife as he attempted to rid himself of the heebie-jeebies and remaining deer interior.

“Kirsch, where’d you get that knife?” Danny asked again, flicking a bit of gall bladder from her wrist. She unfurled a wad of twine and began wrapping the front two feet together.

“My grandpa,” Kirsch said dismissively. “Let’s get this thing outta here.”

Something—because it was very much a _thing_ , not any natural animal—howled (at what Danny recognized as an uncomfortably close distance).

“For once, I agree with you. Get the bottom end.”

“But that’s where the blood drains!”

“Deer blood or your own, Brody,” Danny warned, throwing a nervous glance toward the edge of the woods. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

 

* * *

 

 

“So… bell curve?” Danny asked, sudsy sponge raking a path of disinfectant down from her triceps to her fingernails.

She and Kirsch had retreated to the back porch of the Summer Society lodge and had finished skinning the animal there before hanging the carcass on her gambrel hook in the walk-in freezer. She’d taken out the backstrap before rigor mortis had stiffened the doe, but further butchering would have to be postponed for a later day. Danny noted several repulsive glances from her Summer Soc sisters as she skinned the animal; though whether they were aimed at the blood-drained carcass on the lawn or the Zeta helping her, she wasn’t quite sure. 

She and Kirsch were washing up over a large dual-basin sink when Danny thought to ask why Brody had been out in the woods in the first place.

“Right, bell curve,” Kirsch answered. “I’m still not completely sure what it means, but Science-bud tried to break it down for me.”

“I saw you talking to LaF at lunch,” Danny commented.

“Yeah. They were helping me out with the paperwork part of it.”

“And this afternoon you were doing what, exactly?” Danny asked. “Besides screwing with my hunt.”

“Field experiments, I guess,” Kirsch said, squirting a dollop of heavy-duty dish soap into his overlarge palms. “I don’t know. Observations? ‘Collecting data’,” he chirped, throwing his voice up two octaves and sucking his cheeks inward. Danny chuckled under her breath. It _was_ a decent impression of Dr. Burke in the Biology department (not that Kirsch needed to know that).

“You keep saying it’s an experiment, but then you turn around and start talking about trophy hunting,” Danny said, wiping her hands off on a massive beach towel Cynthia had left on the back porch. She threw it at Kirsch's face and smirked when he yanked it off his head. “You can understand my confusion.”

“Okay, so, back home they score deer on the Boone and Crocket scale," Kirsch began, toweling off. "If you score in the 160s and up, damn, that’s a good deer. But what it really comes down to is _age_.”

“Age?”

“Well, time, I guess. Time for things to grow, to mature.”

“Time and age?”

“Exactly. Say you harvest a buck when he’s only three and a half, but he scored 140-something. That’s a decent deer, you know?”

“Sure,” Danny said, propping herself against the basin. She crossed her arms and gave Kirsch her full attention which, surprisingly, had gotten easier and easier over the past few months. Probably because he finally had something substantial to _say_.

“I’m not sure you do, but anyway… say you passed up that buck until the next season," Kirsch continued. "He’d show back up at 150.”

“That’s assuming he doesn’t get scooped up by someone else.”

“True, but if we put a harvest limit on ages, we’d get better scoring bucks.”

“It’s kinda hard to tell how old a deer is just by looking at it, Kirsch.”

“It’s not so hard if you practice,” Kirsch continued. “That first one you almost shot today? Three and a half. The second with the three does? Two-year old, too young to be harvested. You gotta compare body characteristics of your local population. Even look at the jaw bone after you harvest them.”

“You can tell how old a deer is by examining its jaw bone?” Danny asked.

“Well, yeah,” Kirsch said. “That’s a thing.”

“Not for me, it’s not. I don't run around with animal jaw bones in my back pocket. I'm not Ted Hughes.”

“Huh?” Kirsch said, mouth quirked up in thoughtful befuddlement. “Anyway, it’s like, a big deal for a deer to make it to maturity. If you take ‘em out before they reach it, you’re cutting the lifespan short.”

“That’s sort of the point of hunting.”

“Hunting, maybe. But what about being a good outdoorsman? You've got like, an obligation to make the land better, you know? Just take man out of it,” Kirsch argued. “What I’m saying is, is that mature deer that make it to old age are the best of the best in the gene pool. They’ve survived disease, and predators, and civilization taking up their habitat. They’re the fittest survivors, like Donald said.”

“Kirsch, do you mean Darwin?”

“Whatever,” Kirsch waved off the comment. “It’s like, you take hunters out of the equation for a couple’a seasons, you’re refining your population. The highest average is gonna get shifted to the right on the graph. The bell shaped curve, the peak of it for older deer, is going to move to better scoring averages." Kirsch drew a vertical column with his finger: "Age," he said, then he 'picked up' the column and moved it two spaces two the right. "The horizontal axis is your score, the vertical your population percentage. A bigger percentage of the deer are going to score higher on average, which means a larger percent are going to be healthier, which means a larger percent are going to be running around the forest, taking on those stupid Sasquatches and chimeras and bugbears and stuff. It’ll make things more… I don’t know, a little more natural.”

“As opposed to supernatural?" Danny interjected. "Preternatural?”

“It’s just _un_ natural,” Kirsch said, gesturing wildly toward Silas. “Maybe I want to give the deer a leg up on protecting themselves. If they’re healthier, they’re faster; better eyesight, better hearing. Makes it harder for those bridge trolls and ogres to rip their heads off.”

“Makes it harder for me to get a meal,” Danny grumbled.

“It would mean planting more native trees that they feed from, trying to limit outside factors that kill off their food supply.”

“But we can’t take out their predators, they’d overrun the campus!”

“Fine line, Danny. Is _letting_ nature run its course really a good thing to do when Mother Nature throws weird tree spirits and fanged sprites at the foxes and the deer and the badgers? Or do you think we should step in? Give the indigenous species a fighting chance? I'm not saying kill all the panthers and lynx, but maybe we should interfere when the centaurs go on their hunting spree.”

“I don’t know Kirsch,” Danny said, truly flabbergasted by the forethought the guy had put into the project. “All I know is, if the papers come up right and you explain it that well to your professor… I mean, I think you’d get an A.”

Kirsch lit up, twinkly as fireflies. “You think so?”

“Yeah,” Danny said, and nudged his shoulder. “This coming from the hardest-grading TA in the entire Lit department.”

“Ugh, my literature final,” Kirsch hung his head. “That’s another story.”

“Here,” Danny said, handing over a plastic bag filled with prime meat. “You can have the backstrap.”

“Seriously?” Kirsch asked. “But… that’s the best part.”

Danny shrugged, then gestured over her shoulder. “I’ve got a whole carcass in the deep freeze. I’ll be eating well for the next month. Plus, you helped me field dress the thing.”

“What about your sisters?”

“Not all of them are into wilder game.”

“Maybe they don’t have your patience,” Kirsch said.

“Me? Patient? Sorry, wrong ticket there, bro,” Danny laughed.

“You… you’ll give things a shot though, you know? Give them—uh, the meat, I guess—time to mature.”

Danny tugged her knitted cap off her head and tucked it into her jacket pocket. She wondered if Brody was still talking about deer.

“There’s two filets, come on back to the Zeta house and I’ll grill ‘em up for the both of us,” Kirsch offered.

He looked so open, so hopeful, with that crooked, fault-line smile and dimples deep enough to rival the Marianas. A little dopey, with bright eyes and broad shoulders, but undoubtedly genuine.

“I’ve still got blood all over my clothes,” Danny shook her head quickly and went back to cleaning her boning knives. She’d been staring. "Probably in my hair, too."

“We always have blood on us. Pretty much every major interaction we have includes blood.”

“It does not!” she protested.

“Really?” Kirsch asked incredulously. “Lemme break it down for you: one, I screw something up.”

“Correct so far.”

“Two, you insult me.”

“Because it’s well-deserved.”

“Three, we end up elbow deep in blood.”

“Well, there was that one time at the lake—no, no, there was blood then,” Danny recalled, scratching her jaw under the porch light.

“Four,” Kirsch held his hands up in a what-can-you-do sort of gesture, sly little grin on his face. “We make it back unscathed and you do something nice for me.”

“See, you were doing so well,” Danny teased. “Then you just gotta start making stuff up.”

“You like me okay, Psych—Danny.”

“I like you okay, I guess, as far as you helping me with supernatural shenanigans goes,” Danny said. “And field dressing game. And partnering up for sparring sessions. And marathon training. There’s…” Danny placed her knives back into their sheathes, rubbed a bit of sudsy splashback from her chin and propped her hip against the doorjamb. She tucked her frozen, relatively clean hands under her armpits and sighed.

Again, Brody, Zeta-fratastic-loyal-to-a-fault-and-deluded-beyond-all-comprehension Brody Kirsch, in her space and throwing her off with disarming sincerity. For all his blunders, his heart was in the right place a thousand percent of the time. He just needed a little… finesse. Fine-tuning; help in the execution.

Definitely Danny’s strong suit.

“Underneath all of your bro-crap posturing, your faux chivalric tendencies and hair-brained ideas, even I can concede, especially after your help last year with the whole…"

"Raging fish demon? There's a reason we have Tridents, you know," Kirsch grinned.

"Well, maybe there’s a good guy— a good _man_ lurking beneath the surface.”

“Like another water monster,” Kirsch joked.

“Just… you care about things too, you know?” Danny offered softly. “Sometimes too much.”

“Yeah,” Kirsch said, attention split between the bag of bloodied meat in his hands and Danny’s blue eyes. He finally zeroed in on Danny's face, his lips working to form the right words before he went with: “I know what you mean about… well, I care.”

_Too much._

_Too much._

_Too much._

“Go on then,” Danny coughed, and waved him away. “Gimme half an hour to shower or something.”

“That’s not nearly long enough to soak in a marinade,” Kirsch raised the bag and stuck the tip of his tongue between his lips, likely taking mental stock of his spice cupboard. “Though if I did a dry-rub and got the charcoal going, we could smoke it—”

“You do the cooking, I’m going to shower,” Danny said, pausing at the back door of the Summer Society porch. “Maybe you can tell me about your grandfather. Sounds like he was a cool guy.”

“Great outdoorsman,” Kirsch smiled wetly. “Taught me everything I know!”

“How to hunt? Fish? You're pretty good with that canoe.”

“I don’t know, maybe,” Brody scratched his head. “I just like doing stuff outside. I can hold off on killing things if it’s gonna make the place better. I don’t have that much bloodlust.”

“Sure," Danny agreed.

“Dinner and hiking and blood all over our bodies. Not bad for a first date, huh?”

“Uh,” Danny stuttered, eyebrows threatening to launch themselves from her forehead if they climbed any higher. “This wasn’t a date.”

“Sure it was.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree, Danny-girl.”

“Kirsch, I swear to—”

“Better go, these filets won’t cook themselves!” he darted off before Danny could grab him by the collar. He turned and backpedalled in a jog, yelling, “See you in thirty!”

He kept running, sack flopping wildly in his grip, and Danny hoped he twisted his ankle for all his reverse-running efforts.

“Stupid, fratty, pushy, deluded—”

She ran upstairs and hopped in the shower, pinky-brown streaks of blood and dirt and deer fluid scrubbed from her body in zealous fury. Damn straight she was going over to that Zeta house. To teach Brody Kirsch a lesson. And if she just so happened to eat in the process, well… she _had_ missed lunch.

Somewhere in the nebulous universe of reality represented via charts, the graph titled “Danny Lawrence’s Affections for Brody Kirsch” shifted, with significant resistance, into an incline.

 

**Author's Note:**

> We're just going to operate under the assumption that one needs not possess a hunting license on Silas grounds. I think something like this could happen in another year or so. Give a little time for the young buck to eh hmm, mature. You don't even want to know the source material for this, but let's just say LaF would find it FASCINATING.


End file.
